Elephantech Produces Sustainable PCBs using Innovative Pure Additive Process

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Elephantech is transforming the printed circuit board industry with its proprietary Pure Additive™ production method, delivering SustainaCircuits™ — ultra-efficient, eco-friendly PCBs that help customers cut costs, accelerate development, and significantly reduce their environmental impact. By using advanced inkjet printing to create circuits without traditional subtractive processes, Elephantech drastically lowers resource consumption and carbon emissions while maintaining the same quality and functionality as conventional boards.

They use only additive manufacturing methods to offer customers printed circuit boards that are just that—printed—and by doing so, are drastically reducing resource usage and carbon dioxide emissions compared to conventional printed circuit boards made using subtractive manufacturing methods. At the same time, our simple and efficient production process helps customers get the most out of their resources—time and money.

Elephantech's goal is to use SustainaCircuits™ to offer customers in the electronics industry a significantly more sustainable manufacturing solution while ensuring business growth and reducing environmental footprint.

Product information

To decarbonize the printed circuit board market, Elephantech continues to develop and extend technology to support the production of a wide range of printed circuit boards. We’re currently able to mass produce single-layer flexible printed circuit boards (flex circuits) and are in the process of extending the capacity to include mass production of double-layer flex circuits and FR-4 rigid PCBs.

Single-layer flex circuit

Standard specs:

• Substrate: Polyimide (PI)
• Copper thickness: 12 µm (guaranteed minimum). Available up to 35 µm
• Minimum trace/space: 100/100 µm
• Maximum outer dimensions: 223 x 393 mm
• Minimum FPC connector pitch: 0.3 mm

At Elephantech, they’re always working to increase production capabilities and strive to offer customers optimal solutions tailored to their needs and anticipated mass production schedule. They can easily work with specifications other than those listed above.

Innovative production that refuses to compromise on quality

At Elephantech, they believe production innovation and exceptional quality should go hand-in-hand. That’s a designed production method to ensure the same quality as conventional products while simultaneously offering customers greater efficiency and environmental benefits.

Products currently in development

At Elephantech, the goal is to eventually use our technology to offer production of all types of printed circuit boards, and they’re currently in the process of developing a wide range of substrate manufacturing technologies to make this goal a reality.

Applications for SustainaCircuits™ technology

SustainaCircuits™ are printed circuit boards made by printing metal nano ink directly onto the substrate using inkjet printing. As our SustainaCircuits™ production technology is compatible with a wide range of substrate materials, we expect to be able to adapt it to a wide variety of applications.

• Production of special specification printed circuit boards

Example: Long-length flex circuits for monitoring battery levels

In response to an increase in demand driven by a surge in electric vehicle production, they successfully applied printing technology to the development and production of low-cost, long-length flex circuits for monitoring vehicle battery levels.

Example: Screen backlight boards

Print-based processing can be used to simplify the structure of components such as LED backlight wiring and metal heat dissipation boards, potentially speeding up the assembly process and lowering production costs.

• Applications beyond printed circuit boards

Example: Post-processing of semiconductors and display manufacturing

The high-precision, high-productivity NeuralJet™ inkjet print processing technology can also be used in soldermask processing and OLED display manufacturing.

Example: Ultra-thin heater wiring

By applying our technology to ultra-thin heaters of several hundred nm to several μm—a product that is difficult to process with copper foiling and silk screen printing—these can potentially be produced at lower cost and greater productivity than comparative products made using vapor deposition processing.

• Development of applied manufacturing processes using inkjet printing technology

Example: IMPC® (In-Mold Printed Circuits)

As their In-Mold Printed Circuits use film insert molding to integrate the circuit into a molded plastic component, they are thinner, lighter, and comprised of fewer parts than in-mold electronics produced using conventional methods.

Click here to learn more about SustainaCiruits from Elephantech.